MUSSOLINI’S SHADOW: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano
By Ray Moseley
Yale University Press, 302 pages, $29.95
CARLO ROSSELLI: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile
By Stanislao G. Pugliese
Harvard University Press, 309 pages, $35
Is it coincidence that recent months have seen the release of parallel biographies, one of Benito Mussolini’s nemesis, radical Carlo Rosselli, the other of the man who probably ordered Rosselli’s murder, Mussolini’s foreign minister and son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano?
The initial similarities between the two men are striking: Both born on the cusp of the new century into wealthy, politically connected families, they charged through youth and formal education with a visceral impatience to seize the world. Both embraced risk and died young, Rosselli assassinated with his brother Nello at only 37, Ciano, condemned as a traitor to Il Duce, executed by firing squad at 41. Inflamed by idealism, Rosselli is hallowed today as a martyr to freedom. Ciano’s only ethic until the very end was opportunism; today he is reviled even by the fascist faithful as the epitome of the arrogance and corruption of Mussolini’s 20-odd years of violence.
Both authors prove such stereotypes to be far too simple, but if we read biographies partly in search of object lessons, these two tragedies offer stark contrasts between a life of compulsive self-sacrifice and another glutted with self-satisfaction.
As happens with demons versus angels, Ciano’s is the more exciting story, and his conversion to integrity at the end of his life grants him, in biographer Ray Moseley’s eyes, a tragic stature. Stanislao Pugliese’s life of Rosselli, by contrast, is an intellectual biography whose author proposes Rosselli’s liberal socialism as newly relevant to the post-Cold War world.
Born Jewish and Florentine in 1899, Rosselli was a remarkable son of a family of iconoclasts. His great uncle was intimate with Giuseppe Mazzini, the visionary of Italian independence. His playwright mother wrote the Italian equivalent of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” to attack how marriage falsified women. Rosselli’s daughter Amelia was one of Italy’s most penetrating poets until she died in 1996. His father, a musician called Joe for his love of all things English, left the family when Carlo was 2. His mother gave her children all the benefits of affluence but relentlessly stressed their contact with larger social forces. To cure his incipient snobbishness, she sent her eldest son, Aldo, to apprentice with a carpenter, and she enrolled Carlo in technical school rather than the classical ginnasio expected of an upper-class child. As he grew, fiery Carlo played off his beloved younger brother, the scholarly and reserved Nello, who was destined to die at his side.
Standard history tells that Mussolini recruited his first fascist squads from the masses of veterans who returned from victory in World War I only to find hardship and unemployment. Catalyzing anger at the “mutilated victory,” the former socialist soon to become Il Duce found it easy to refocus people’s anger onto waffling politicians and striking unions. For Rosselli it was just the opposite; he returned from the war inspired by the brotherhood he had seen at the front, certain that Justice and Liberty (the name he gave to the party and journal he founded) were near at hand. He fought fascism before and after the 1922 march on Rome that brought Mussolini to power; through the ’20s, Black Shirts attacked his cultural center in Florence, ransacked his house and murdered his colleagues. Arrested in 1926 for spiriting socialist leader Filippo Turati out of Italy, Rosselli was sentenced to internal exile on the Sicilian islands of Ustica and Lipari, from which he escaped to Paris in 1929. He would never return to Italy.
In Paris in the ’30s, Rosselli condemned the “intellectual paralysis” that doomed to ineffectuality the anti-fascist exile community. Communists, anarchists, socialists, liberals and Catholics published factional journals attacking each other with more bile than they aimed at Mussolini himself. In his most important theoretical work, “Liberal Socialism” (written while still confined on Lipari), Rosselli sought to bind socialist volunteerism to the Enlightenment tradition of liberalism. Pugliese, an assistant professor of history at Hofstra University, goes into detail on these disputes; the book here reads as though it began as a doctoral dissertation, and though the issues are dramatically delineated, this material can be of interest to specialists only.
In 1936 Rosselli organized and fought at the head of the first Italian column in the Spanish Civil War. From Barcelona he broadcast into Italy the call to arms that made him the most prominent anti-fascist revolutionary, and thus probably sealed his fate. As Rosselli recuperated from a painful bout of phlebitis outside Paris in summer 1937, Nello came to visit him. The brothers were stabbed and shot to death when they stopped to help a car that appeared to have broken down beside a country road. Strong evidence suggests that the order for the assassination came from Ciano.
A fascist report on Rosselli said the anti-fascists considered him to be ” `the only possible successor to Mussolini.’ ” In truth the most likely successor to Mussolini was his adoring son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano. Yet Mussolini’s last independent act as dictator may have been to refuse to save Ciano from the firing squad. This is a story so rich in irony and contradiction that it can only be true; there really is something Shakespearean about it.
The son of a war hero who was ennobled for his exploits and who grew rich as a politician passing out favors to industrialists, Ciano was a teetotaling playboy. He met Mussolini’s reckless daughter, Edda (named after Ibsen’s suicidal heroine, Hedda Gabler), and proposed to her within three weeks. More devoted to his father-in-law than to his wife, Ciano even adopted Mussolini’s mannerisms-the upthrust chin, the short-legged swagger, the habit of speaking even in private as though addressing a crowd from a balcony. He began as a diplomat notorious for boorish gaffes, but in a flash rose to become minister of press and propaganda. He backdated his fascist credentials, and after an audacious flight into enemy territory during the invasion of Ethiopia, he returned to Italy to be named Europe’s youngest foreign minister.
Ciano and Edda sparkled in Roman high society. Though mocked by friends and enemies alike (even in one of Rosselli’s journals) for his advancement through connections, no one could deny that the man had charm. Surrounded by promiscuous glitterati, Ciano mowed a path through princesses and actresses drawn to his power and glamor; for her part, Edda was known to prefer Nordic riding-instructor types, though a psychologist later diagnosed her as hopelessly frigid.
Journalist Ray Moseley, the Tribune’s chief European correspondent, has done an impressive job of weaving first-person accounts and later histories into a compelling narrative. His story turns on the change that overcame Ciano as he realized the madness of chaining Italy’s fate to Germany’s war of empire. Moseley includes fascinating interviews and a key unpublished memoir, but the central document in any life of Ciano is the diary he kept as foreign minister. When he was arrested by fascists for voting to remove Mussolini from power, Ciano and Edda tried to use the diary as a bargaining chip to save his life. Instead, it guaranteed his death. Ciano’s diary was sensational because it recorded the appalling infantilism and self-deception that guided Mussolini’s decision-making, and the ways petty jealousies between Italian and German officials determined the life or death of innumerable citizens of their own countries. Ciano repeatedly cites verbatim Mussolini’s contempt for the Italian people, the very masses who had raised him to quasi-divine status.
Ultimately, Ciano’s status as likely successor made him unbearable to Mussolini once the dictatorship started to wobble. When the favorite dared question his master’s judgment, he was removed from his post. After Italy’s armistice with the Allies in September 1943, the Nazis installed Mussolini as head of a puppet state in northern Italy. Facing certain defeat, the desperate tyrant’s last effectual gesture was to oversee the trial of Ciano.
Moseley’s version of Ciano’s transformation in these last months is the most gripping part of his story. He offers much evidence to suggest that in the end, Ciano became a true husband, father and patriot. But despite the dignity of his last hours, Count Galeazzo Ciano doesn’t merit the tragic grandeur of a Shakespearean king. Let us shed our tears instead for Carlo Rosselli.
